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RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING:
10-YEAR REVIEW



Solo Exhibition
Architectural Association Gallery, London, UK.
11 October – 7 December, 2024


 This multisensory exhibition tells situated stories of the entangled flows of people and land around an ordinary village in China. Through curated visual, sonic and bodily encounters, it surfaces hidden transformations in Chinese rural homes and village landscapes that sustain the floating labour force behind the country’s urbanisation. The exhibition also reflects on a decade-long process of practice, tracing its evolving methods and media—interweaving architecture, anthropology, filmmaking, and performance.

Staged at the Architectural Association (AA), the exhibition marks a homecoming to the place where this project first began. It was unfolded not as a fixed arrangement of works but as a movement—an ebbing and flowing of images, voices, materials, and stories that refused to stay still. An immersive walk-around screening of the Ripple Ripple Rippling film trilogy invites audiences to move beyond the fixed spectator’s gaze, drifting instead through projected village streets, family yards, and interior rooms. Alongside, multimedia storytelling panels assemble drawings, photographs, and field footage into fragments of life and landscape from Shigushan village. The stories of the two most ‘hidden’ groups in the community—affectionately called the aunties and grannies—are paired with sanded patches on the gallery walls. Running a hand across these surfaces, the subtle one-millimetre topographic shift quietly registers 16 years of exhibition history at the AA. Together, these gestures form a double act of revealing, linking the AA gallery with the Chinese village.

Ripple Ripple Rippling is not simply an exhibition. It is a rhythm, a method, a way of being in relation: expanding, colliding, dispersing, and returning. Like water disturbed, it leaves no single trace but a surface alive with movement.
 LINKS

Virtual 3D tour of the exhibition     
FILM TRILOGY
     On the Margins
     The Hall
     Till Ashes Turn Into Pines


PUBLIC PROGRAMME
     Transversal Alliances Symposium, AA Lecture Hall, London, United Kingdom, 11 October 2024

     Jesse Darling in conversation with Jingru (Cyan) Cheng & Chen Zhan, AA Lecture Hall, London, United Kingdom, 24 October 2024


MEDIA
      Wallpaper review: Architectural Association's newest show uncovers the architectural legacies of rural China's lost generation, 2024

       KoozArch interview: Ripple, Traces, Drifts:  Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan on process-oriented practice, 2025

     
RELATED PROJECT
     Ripple Ripple Rippling


CREDITS

Curated by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Chen Zhan, Mengfan Wang and AA Public Programme

Exhibition Realisation: AA Public Programme
Exhibition Installation: Install Archive and AA Facilities 
Exhibition Graphic Design and Editorial: AA Communications Studio
Exhibition AV: AA Audio-Visual Department
Exhibition Printing: AA Print Centre 
Exhibition Title Signwriting: Mengfan Wang
Installation Photo: Anne Tetzlaff, Chen Zhan
Installation Video: Arturo Bandinelli, Chen Zhan


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The exhibition was supported by the Architectural Association, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Huazhong University of Science and Technology School of Architecture and Urban Planning, as well as villagers from Shigushan. 


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